When America Believed Bat People Lived on the Moon: The Great Moon Hoax

On this episode of Our American Stories, decades before Orson Welles’s War of the Worlds shocked the nation, a New York newspaper convinced thousands of Americans that the Moon was teeming with life. Beginning on August 25, 1835, The Sun published a sensational series claiming that famed English astronomer Sir John Herschel had discovered a lunar civilization populated by bat-like humanoids, strange beaver creatures, miniature zebras, and other bizarre lifeforms. For a time, America believed it. However, it was all a hoax.

Our regular contributor, Ashley Hlebinsky, shares the story of the Great Moon Hoax of 1835: a tale of fake news before the internet, the explosive rise of the penny press, and one of the strangest media frenzies in American history.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:10):
This is Lee Habib, and this is our American Stories.
The Moon and space exploration are magnets for fake news,
but eighteen thirty five launched the most imaginative Moon hoax
of the mall you're to tell another story for our
American Stories is regular contributor Ashley Lebinski. Take it away, Ashley.

Speaker 2 (00:31):
Picture this.

Speaker 3 (00:33):
It's late August of eighteen thirty five, and you're a
New Yorker and you open your newspaper and you learn
something out of this world. That story says that life
has been discovered on the Moon. There was said to
be strange lunar landscapes on the Moon that had rivers

(00:54):
and vegetation and these enormous crystals and animals.

Speaker 2 (00:59):
Unlike anything you've seen on Earth.

Speaker 3 (01:01):
It described bison like beasts, horned creatures that resemble unicorns,
tail is fevers that walked upright, and the most sensational,
maybe the creepiest one of them all, winged humanoids. The
story appeared in a series of six articles in The
New York Sun beginning on August twenty fifth, eighteen thirty five,

(01:25):
and it quickly became one of the most famous newspaper
hoaxes in American history. To understand why so many people
paid attention, you really have to understand the culture of
the moment. The New York Sun, which was founded in
eighteen thirty three, was one of the new penny press newspapers,

(01:47):
so it was cheap, lively, and it was aimed at
more of a masked audience rather than publications that were
focused on a few narrow elite and it favored narrative
drama and had this kind of immediacy. Readers in the
eighteen thirties were also deeply interested in science, astronomy and

(02:09):
the possibility.

Speaker 2 (02:10):
Of life beyond Earth. And around the same time P. T.

Speaker 3 (02:16):
Barnum is traveling around the country with his shows, and
he is the prince of the Humbug Right, and he's
alive during this period. So I can't say whether or
not PT. Barnum read these stories, but if he did,
he would have loved them. But he did in eighteen
forty one, so not long Just like six years after
these stories he did open his first museum in New York,

(02:37):
which was the ultimate display of creatures that didn't quite exist.
So it kind of plays onto the culture of the
moment that New Yorkers who are reading a new kind
of newspaper, are so enthralled with this idea of a
scientific phenomenon that was both real and supernaw in some

(03:01):
respects that they would eat this story up. And then
they're not hurt by the fact that it's unreal. They
embrace it when P. T. Barnum opens his museum.

Speaker 4 (03:11):
This was really a democratizing era. You know, Andrew Jackson
was in the White House at the time. You were
beginning to see the falling away of a lot of
the venerable traditions of the old world. You know, cartmen
didn't doft their hats to their employers anymore. People called
each other mister rather than sir. Shaking hands instead of bowing,

(03:35):
you know, became much more widely in use. So this
really was a democratizing time. And I think part of
the appeal of hoaxes at that time was that people
were beginning to understand their own right of judgment, their
own right of determining what was true and what was
not true. And you know, as Barnum said, when you

(03:56):
pay your quarter and you get to the top of
the stairs, you can decide what is true. And it
became kind of an implicit competition between the hoaxer and
the patron to see if he can fool them, and
if they were successfully fooled, they felt not cheated, they
felt entertained.

Speaker 3 (04:14):
So the timing of this article was perfect. The British
astronomer Sir John Herschel, which was one of the most
respected scientific figures in the world, really was at this
point in South Africa working with powerful telescopic equipment. So
what was that real expedition that the article used that

(04:34):
ultimately gave a false story, that powerful anchor in reality
that it desperately needed. The articles claimed to be reprinted
from the Edinburgh Journal of Science, so you know, can't
get more serious than that, And it was attributed to
a supposed associate of Herschel named doctor Andrew Grant, but

(04:55):
there was a problem with this because Grant did not
exist and the journal had seized public caaing years earlier. Still,
the writing in the Sun was crafted to sound scientific.
It was mixed with technical language, observational detail, and the
authority of Herschel's name. And one of the enduring reasons

(05:15):
the story became so famous is that it did not
merely suggest life on the Moon. It offered a new
world which was seemingly ordered, populated, and could be observed,
according to them, through a telescope of unprecedented power. So
this spread well beyond New York and it actually went international.

Speaker 4 (05:37):
These papers were really quite good in a lot of ways.
They had very good, strong local coverage, which was something
that had never been done before. Within about fifteen or
twenty years, you really see the end of the old
line merchant newspapers. The sixpenny papers had virtually disappeared by
the eighteen fifties. This was a moment where a new

(05:58):
kind of journalism, much more affordable, much faster, and some
kind of snappy took over from the old style of journalism.
And it really only took about fifteen years before the
old style had disappeared entirely.

Speaker 3 (06:12):
According to the Library of Congress, by August twenty eighth,
the day the Winged People appeared, many readers designed, okay,
this is a lot and they started to back away,
And by August twenty ninth, some newspapers were already calling
it a hoax.

Speaker 2 (06:30):
And the big mystery at this point is who did it.

Speaker 3 (06:34):
There's some speculation that the likely author was Richard Adams, Locke,
who was a Cambridge educated journalist who worked for The Sun.
Historians generally credit him with writing the series, though the
paper did not immediately identify him publicly, which is not
surprising because I don't know at that point if YOUEW
wanted to delay any claim to those stories. There are others, though,

(06:56):
and other accounts that the articles were possibly always and
to it as satire aimed in part at popular speculative
writing about extraterrestrial life, and especially the work of Reverend
Thomas Dick, who had argued for heavily populated worlds beyond Earth.

Speaker 2 (07:13):
So this wasn't just a concept that happened in a vacuum.

Speaker 3 (07:17):
The Sun had produced a story so artfully tuned to
the scientific imagination of the moment that satire and journalism
blurred together. There was another literary wrinkle in this story,
which is just months earlier, Edgar Allan Poe had published
a fictional tale involving a voyage to the Moon, presented

(07:38):
in a pseudo factual way. Poe believed his idea had
been borrowed and reworked for the Sun's lunar sensation. Just
under a month after all this happened, the Sun admitted
that the Moon's stories were false, but the fallout was
surprisingly mild. Readers were generally amused, and the paper did

(07:59):
not come under the embarrassment. In fact, the hoax helped
prove something important about American mass media, which is a
newspaper could build enormous attention by combining authority, novelty, and narrative.

Speaker 2 (08:14):
And as we know today, that lesson would not be forgotten.

Speaker 3 (08:18):
And that's why the Great Moon Hoax still matters today.

Speaker 2 (08:22):
It wasn't just a prank.

Speaker 3 (08:24):
It was an early demonstration of the power of modern media.
It showed how easily scientific authority could be borrowed, how
eagerly the public would embrace that story, and how porous
the boundary between fact and entertainment could become. It's also
revealed something more enduring. People do not just want information,

(08:47):
They want a sense of wonder. In eighteen thirty five,
the New York Sun gave them wonder by the column
inch and for a few extraordinary days, Americans believed that
the heavens had opened and that the news had arrived
in the morning paper.

Speaker 1 (09:06):
And a terrific job on the production, editing and storytelling
by our own Greg Hengler and a special thanks to
frequent contributor Ashley Libinski. She's the former co host of
Discovery Channel's Master of Arms and she's also the co
founder of the University of Wyoming College of Laws Firearms
Research Center. Always we appreciate her input and her storytelling,

(09:27):
and my goodness, this is a great one, and by
the way, it still goes on today, this marriage of
fact and fantasy. People didn't want just information in eighteen
thirty five. They want wonder those great interest in science
and astrology and life on other planets. Sound familiar, The
story of the Great Moon Hoax of eighteen thirty five

(09:50):
fake news before anybody knew what fake news was. Here
on our American Stories